The terms California Impressionism and California Plein-Air Painting describe the large movement of 20th century California artists who worked out of doors (en plein air), directly from nature in California, United States. Their work became popular in the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California in the first three decades after the turn of the 20th century. Considered to be a regional variation on American Impressionism, the California Impressionists are a subset of the California Plein-Air School. History The California Impressionist artists depicted the California landscape from the south to the north — the foothills, mountains, seashores, and deserts of the interior and coastal regions. California Impressionism reached its peak of popularity in the years before the Great Depression. The California Impressionists generally painted in a bright, chromatic palette with loose, painterly brush work that showed influence from French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. These artists gathered in art colonies in places like Carmel-by-the-Sea and Laguna Beach as well as in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Pasadena, and even Giverny. The artists associated with California Impressionism were influenced by European Impressionism, and members such as Guy Rose and Alson Clark were educated and closely associated with European Impressionists. Organizations like the California Art Club, the Painters and Sculptors Club, San Francisco's Sketch Club, The Carmel Art Association, The Laguna Beach Art Association and the Los Angeles Museum of History, Art and Science played a key role in popularizing the work of the California Impressionists. While impressionist-influenced painting remained popular in California well after it did in Europe or the Eastern United States, in the late 1920s impressionism was seen as old-fashioned and conservative. In the 1930s, more modern styles became accepted, and the movement fell into decline. Artists In the 1890s, European ideas and painting techniques finally made their way to the west coast of the United States. We call the group of artists who responded to these ideas the California Impressionists, but that is not a name that they self-applied. Charles Desmarais, director of the Laguna Art Museum, noted that this phrase "is a misnomer if it implies any but the most tenuous connections to the theory-based art born in France decades before". Patricia Trenton argued that the "common thread that binds these artists is the recognition and depiction of light through color, an interest fostered in part by the dissemination of the color theories of Michel-Eugene Chevreul and Albert